Best find and replace tool?

Posted by smemon in Work on 06 6th, 2009 | Comments

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Up until last week, i was just using notepad or textpad or even firefox to find and replace keywords. CTRL + F does the job in most applications. I always love saving time and energy so i was delighted when i came across a way to search through entire FOLDERS to find and replace keywords.

You can do it in Dreamweaver. You can’t do it in textpad or notepad (you can only search within files). Needless to say, Dreamweaver has now become my no.1 editing tool

ctrlf Best find and replace tool?

Simple CTRL + F, which will pull up the find and replace box… the click on the ‘find in’ dropdown menu and change it to ‘folder’…. navigate to your folder and there you have it… find and replace keywords in an entire folder of files or subfolders….

Hugely valuable to web developers. I’m not sure if this is well known or whether i’m just slow to pick up on it, but it’s almost worth getting Dreamweaver for this feature alone Apart from dreamweaver i use notepad, notepad++, textpad & wordpad for basic text editing. I never use word unless i’m writing an ebook or tutorial for someone or something. What do you guys use and why?!

Daniel Corbier

Check out Dacorbi Pattern Search at www.dacorbi.com (and look at the examples for performing search/replace operations on HTML). The current version works only with single files for now, but with enough feedback, future versions might work on multiple files.

<a href="htpp://www.ucalc.com">Dacorbi Pattern Search

smemon

wow, seems very complicated :-) but you obviously know what you're doing though if you can rhyme it off like that! Think i'll stick with my dreamweaver method for now ;-)

Enda Crossan

I do this in textpad using the following method:

Search >> Find In Files
Find: enter the text you want to find
In files: select filter filter of *.* for all files
In folder: Set this to the root folder you want to look in

When you press Find, the results appear at the bottom of the screen. Highlight all the search results (Ctrl A), right click and select open all. This opens all files with any instances of the string you searched for. You can then use Search >> Replace (F8) and set scope as: all documents before going your search and replace. You see an * in the document selector tab for all files that have changed and after this just use File >> Save All. I've never found any problems doing it this as long as your careful that normal text strings and code are not the same. Sounds like a lot of steps but only takes a few seconds.